Pieter Symonsz Potter, Elijah taken up into Heaven in the Chariot of Fire
Friday
I end the week with a well-known poem about poetry that I used to think was smarmy but now consider magnificent.
Maybe I dismissed Emily Dickinson’s “There is no Frigate like a Book” because I considered it a children’s poem, having encountered it at a very early age.
Later, as a teenager, I associated it with the young and naïve Sandy Dennis in the 1967 film Up the Down Staircase. In a hilarious scene, first-year-teacher Dennis tries teaching the poem to a classroom full of tough, urban kids, who see “frigate” as two words and define it much differently than Dickinson. If Dennis is to survive and flourish in this environment, she must become more street smart, while as a shy 16-year-old my own sense of growing up included rejecting that which is childish.
Now, however, I love the sense of wonder Dickinson expresses in the poem. Books really do take us lands away:
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul –
Always the contrast is between the humble and the magnificent, with the humble turning in a far more impressive performance. A frigate in full sail may be impressive, and a courser (warhorse) as well. But poems do what poems do and aren’t confined to the wealthy and the proud.
“Bears” is surely a pun—through poetry, the poet bares her soul and through poetry readers discovers theirs. How remarkable that a book, available to anyone who has access to a library, beats out frigates and coursers for magnificence. A book is a chariot, only not an instrument of war this time.
In fact, I suspect the chariot that Dickinson has in mind is Elijah’s fiery chariot, one of the few instances in the Bible of a human being transported directly to heaven. Poetry performs a similar miracle, effortlessly moving us from the earthly to the transcendent.
And having entered the realm of religion, we need to mention Dickinson’s allusion to Jesus, who informed us that the kingdom of God is open to the poorest. No toll demanded.
Meryl Streep as a modern version of Mrs. Dalloway in The Hours
Thursday
Last year (April 26, 2020) I reported on a fascinating Evan Kindley New Yorker article that links Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to the great 1918-20 flu epidemic. Now Literary Hub has published another account of someone making the link. The difference between the two readings is the difference between how we were experiencing Covid 18 months ago and how we are experiencing it now.
In making his case, Kindley acknowledges that the novel barely mentions the illness, which had struck seven years before. But he points out that Woolf’s mother died of the flu in 1895 and that she herself had dangerous run-ins with it throughout her life, which means that it may operate as a kind of absent presence in the work. Kindley says that the joy Clarissa Dalloway takes in shopping is an assertion of life in the face of death.
His own longing to go out in public during the Covid lockdowns helped him see this. Thus, a line like “she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” takes on a whole new meaning. So does Clarissa’s announcement, appearing in the famous opening line, that she (rather than her maid) will go out and buy the flowers for her party. Kindley describes the novel as “the most ecstatic representation of running errands in the Western canon,” and one sees her exhilaration at going out in the following passage. As you read it, think back to how you yourself felt the first time you were able to go to a restaurant or other public venue following quarantine:
And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh–the admirable Hugh!
Literary Hub’s Colin Dickey, writing a year and a half later, has a related but slightly different take on the novel. It’s caused by the fact that, while the pandemic is not over, an ending appears in sight. From that point of view, Mrs. Dalloway is a post-apocalyptic novel:
For all our love of post-apocalyptic fiction, what Mrs Dalloway offers is a glimpse of a true “dystopian” reality, for Woolf understood that a dystopian future would not look like The Hunger Games or The Road so much as it would the everyday, banal world of Before, shot through now with the dead and their ghosts—where everything is the same but all is changed, changed utterly.
Dickey writes that few books “capture this moment” as well as Mrs. Dalloway, which he describes as “a novel obsessed with the question of how moving on can be possible”:
How can anyone have a party in the wake of the flood? It is a question the novel takes both rhetorically—how dare anyone have a party in such a time—and literally: how might it be possible to do such a thing? It is a novel about a broken, hobbled England, unable to face the wreckage of war and influenza and the death throes of its own empire, where nonetheless the work of the living persists, where, as the character Peter Walsh observes, “life had a way of adding day to day.”
In other words, after something as cataclysmic as a pandemic, we have to look backward and forward at the same time. The novel helps Dickey frame our own contradictory times:
The pandemic is now over—except for those for whom it is not. Healthcare workers, stunned and traumatized by what they’ve seen, and still processing late breaking waves and public indifference. Restaurant workers who saw their colleagues decimated and now face entitled patrons who tip poorly. Those who lost jobs, lost homes, fell behind, fell out. Parents with kids under five. Those with compromised immune systems, for whom the vaccines don’t take. Longhaulers. People whose loved ones have died. People who have died. The pandemic is now over except for those who’ve lost something, which is every one of us.
And yet, the work of living goes on—doggedly, at times obscenely. We have not yet even begun to face the task of what we owe the dead, and we are nonetheless still faced with the question of what we owe the still living. There are birthday parties to plan, quarterly reports due, new books to read, new friends to make. Our faces are still turned toward the past, fixedly contemplating the single catastrophe of the past two years, wreckage upon wreckage, still wanting to wake the dead and make whole what’s been smashed, even as the storm called Progress propels us into the future.
And further on:
We’ve been through so much, seen too much, suffered too much, are still too raw and wounded. The temptation is to stay too long down there, in the wounds and in the depths, but we are not just our wounds, not just our trauma. We are also our longing and aspirations and our regrets, and we assume the shapes we do because we hope in whatever meager way to hold the future and realize it. In each and every exchange, each and every seemingly superficial interaction, lies the potential for the whole of the world, the whole of a life.
Mrs. Dalloway captures these contradictory emotions, which makes Clarissa’s flower shopping seem at once trivial and life-affirming. Likewise, her response to her friend Septimus Smith’s suicide seems at once callous and compassionate, with critics unable to decide which is uppermost:
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur is among those who see in her response empathy and vindication: “Septimus’s death, understood and in some way shared, gives to the instinctive love that Clarissa holds for life a tone of defiance and of resolution”; Woolf scholar Julia Briggs instead sees callous indifference: Clarissa accepts, she argues, “his death as the sacrifice that enables the party to go on—as if the millions of war deaths have served only to guarantee the continuance of her way of life.”
Dickey vacillates between the two:
Myself, having read Mrs Dalloway some dozen times, each at a different moment in my life, I’ve found room for both readings; times when I only see Clarissa as the superficial society lady, and times when I see a Clarissa whose belief in the vitality of life redeems Septimus Smith’s death.
When I was younger, perhaps, it was easy enough to decide on a single reading. Now, I’m less sure. What I find now, in this world newly and utterly changed, is that when Woolf asks the question, How does one throw a party after the end of the world?, she asks it neither literally nor rhetorically, but with both inflections at once. It is impossible to do such things without seeming callous and indifferent—and yet, we must find a way to do them anyway. To exist after a tragedy is to bear survivor’s guilt and to be unable to shake the ghosts of those we’ve lost and also to nonetheless dream of—and demand—some kind of future for ourselves.
Dickey concludes,
One reads Mrs Dalloway because it asks questions it cannot fully answer, questions that are all the more urgent because they will never have simple or easy answers. That—and also to be reminded that even in the bright and banal surfaces of the world—the bustle of the city, a stand of flowers, a society party—there are clues to the secret pulse of the world, thrumming beneath us and all around us, drawing us ever forward to whatever may come next.
Dickey says that “one does not read Woolf’s novel as a guide on how to live,” but I think he has shown just the opposite. Woolf has shown just how difficult it is to live in the face of trauma and, by her complex response, given us a framework within which to consider our options. We can neither ignore the past (which is still ongoing) nor let it keep us from moving forward. Some days we may lean one way, some days the other. Woolf lets us that this very uncertainty is life.
Four years ago, borrowing an idea from New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, I wrote a blog post comparing Donald Trump to Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Today I update that post since it is more relevant now than it was in 2017.
Havisham, you’ll recall, is the elderly spinster who can’t get over having been jilted at the altar decades before, becoming permanently embittered. To avenge herself against men, she adopts an orphan girl (Estelle), hoping that she’ll break hearts. Her plan works as Estelle breaks the heart of innocent Pip, the novel’s protagonist.
Bruni compared Trump to Miss Havisham over the way he was continuing, almost a year after he won his election, to obsess over Hillary Clinton:
He’s more or less back to chanting “lock her up,” as if it’s early November all over again. He has frozen the calendar there so that he can perpetually savor the exhilaration of the campaign and permanently evade the drudgery of governing and the ignominy of his failure at it so far.
Nov. 8 is his Groundhog Day, on endless repeat, in a way that pleases and pacifies him. That movie has a co-star, Clinton. If he dwells in it, he dwells with her. He can no more retire her than Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, could put away her wedding dress. Clinton brings Trump back to the moment before the rose lost its blush and the heartache set in.
The problem with the original Havisham comparison, of course, is that Trump actually won the election. It’s as if Miss Havisham had actually gotten married to Compeyson but remained bitter because… Well, actually that plot wouldn’t make any sense, just as it didn’t make much sense with Trump.
Now, however, the parallel actually works because Trump was indeed jilted by the voters in 2020, one of only three presidents in the past 100 years to be defeated while running for reelection. Now Trump can’t let go of the fact that he lost, even as (as is the case with Havisham) his wedding dress ages, along with the wedding cake. Imagine these as election-night paraphernalia, made up to celebrate a victory that never happened. What Pip sees is both horrific and pathetic:
Whether I should have made out this object so soon if there had been no fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an arm-chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.
She was dressed in rich materials,—satins, and lace, and silks,—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,—the other was on the table near her hand,—her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass.
It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.
If it were only Havisham and Trump withering away in permanent bitterness, it would be one thing. However, both find a way to pass their bitterness along to others, with catastrophic consequences. Havisham creates, in Estelle, the hollow shell of a human being, someone with a heart of ice who then makes others suffer. Trump, meanwhile, has created followers, starting with the January 6 insurrectionists but extending now to virtually the entire Republican Party, who either believe his lies or pretend to. These are now consumed with Trump’s own bitterness and are out to break democracy itself.,
In my 2017 column, I urged the GOP to take a lesson from Pip, who must realize that Miss Havisham is not the benefactor he thought she was. (His actual benefactor is an escaped convict.) Only later does he learn that she has taken him in, not to benefit him, but to enroll him in her narcissistic plot: she needs someone on whom Estelle can practice her heartbreaking skills. How many Republicans have been similarly taken in by Trump, thinking that he will benefit them, only to have their great expectations blasted?
In that early column, I hoped that at least some Republicans would realize that pinning their future on Trump was a fool’s errand. In the novel, Pip must break free from his imagined dependence on Havisham and grow up on his own.
Little did I imagine that Trump would just populate the world with little Havishams–or to change texts for just a moment, that Trump would fulfill the dream of the monster in Shakespeare’s Tempest, raping Miranda (democracy in our case) and “peopl[ling] this isle with Calibans.”
But back to Dickens. The difference between Havisham and Trump is that, in the end, she regrets the damage she has caused and asks for forgiveness, whereas I can’t imagine our past president doing anything of the sort. I like to think there’s a possibility that the ice-hearted followers created by Trump will soften, as Estelle does by the end of the book. Pip certainly ends his account optimistically.
Many readers of the novel, however, think that Pip is naïve and that Estelle has been irreparably damaged. As you read the final paragraphs, tell me what you think, both with regard to Pip and Estelle’s future and our own:
“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench.
“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
Optimist that I am, I have always believed Pip and I have always believed in America’s future. Recent events have taken their toll on me, however. Now, I worry we may be stuck forever in the ruined place.
Today is the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the “day that will live in infamy” and the occasion that brought America into World War II. That war, called by some “the great war” and by documentarist Ken Burns “the worst war” produced some very strange but breakthrough novels, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.
It also shaped my father, who was drafted out of Carleton College early in 1942 and spent time in both France and Germany, crossing over the England Channel two weeks after D Day. He was fortunate that, as an interpreter, he didn’t end up fighting, but he did witness Dachau three days after it was liberated. In fact, one of his jobs when he was stationed in Munich was to take Germans through the concentration camp, both to show them what their country had done and to make sure that they didn’t dismiss it as so much American propaganda.
Like many veterans, my father had no illusions about war. He wrote the following poem after my youngest son Toby—called “Mike” in the poem for the rhyme—asked him about his war experiences for a school project. What emerged in his accounting was the mess that war always is. In that way, he shares a vision with Vonnegut and Heller.
My father always hated that his generation was called “the greatest,” so the title he has given the poem is ironic. Idealizing those who serve, he felt, is always an inducement to more war. When he returned to the States in 1945, he became a proud member of the War Resisters League.
“The Greatest Generation” By Scott Bates
“What was the Second World War like?” I am asked by my youngest grandson, Mike, Who has just remembered that he has To write a paper for his English class And hopes his grandfather will tell him a story Like Private Ryan, full of guts and glory. “That’s easy,” I answer—I am the One Who Was There, the Expert, the Veteran– (Who has read in the paper, by the way, That thousands of vets die every day), “It was boring, mostly,” I say, “and very Gung-ho.” I think. “It was pretty scary. And long. And the longer it got, the more idiotic It seemed.” I stop. “It was patriotic.”
How to tell the kid the exciting news That we survived on sex and booze. And hated the Army and hated the War And hoped They knew what we were fighting for . . . . And I remember my buddy, Mac, Who got shot up in a tank attack, And Sturiano, my closest friend . . .
I recently came across someone mentioning Civil War soldiers carrying around copies of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. This sent me to google, where I found a scholarly article by one Vanessa Steinroetter entitled “Soldiers, Readers, and the Reception of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in Civil War America” (in the journal Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History). Apparently, the novel was a tremendous hit amongst both Yankee and Confederate troops. Copies were passed around, both in the field and in prison camps. Often there were group readings.
I was intrigued that Confederate soldiers liked the novel given that Hugo was a slavery opponent, but Steinroetter explains that readers just slid around that inconvenient dimension of the novel, focusing on passages more to their liking. It turns out that people feeling oppressed will respond to narratives about oppression, even if they’re also in the business of oppressing others.
The Hugo passage I had most in mind is what happens to Thénardier, one of literature’s most unscrupulous villains. Attempting to blackmail Marius towards the end of novel with news that his father-in-law, Jean Valjean, is a murderer, Thénardier inadvertently reveals that Valjean is actually Marius’s savior. The “murder victim” that Thénardier saw Jean Valjean carry through the sewers was actually Marius himself, unconscious after being wounded from a street battle. In the interchange, Marius learns that Valjean is also innocent of other crimes he had suspected him of, which leads him to reconcile with the old man.
Grateful to the blackmailer for revealing the truth about his father-in-law, Marius rewards him handsomely. And what does the villain do with his new-found wealth? He traffics in slaves:
Two days after the events which we are at this moment narrating, he set out, thanks to Marius’ care, for America under a false name, with his daughter Azelma, furnished with a draft on New York for twenty thousand francs.
The moral wretchedness of Thénardier, the bourgeois who had missed his vocation, was irremediable. He was in America what he had been in Europe. Contact with an evil man sometimes suffices to corrupt a good action and to cause evil things to spring from it. With Marius’ money, Thénardier set up as a slave-dealer.
According to Steinroetter, a few southerners care enough to register objections. In one edition of the novel, she says, the southern publisher excised the passage, along with two mentions of John Brown:
“A few scattered sentences, reflecting on slavery—which the author, with strange inconsistency, has thought fit to introduce into a work written mainly to denounce the European systems of labor as gigantic instruments of tyranny and oppression.” These passages, the editor added, had “not the remotest connection with the characters or the incidents of the novel, and the absence of a few antislavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers.”
The only European system of labor I can recall from the novel is the factory in which Fantine works and which, because it is run by Jean Valjean, is benign. (Fantine is fired, unbeknownst to him, because it is discovered she has had a child out of wedlock.) In other words, it’s a stretch that Hugo is going after European systems of labor. From a slavery apologist, however, the chattel slavery of the south is more humane than the “wage slavery” of the north. When Hugo doesn’t agree, he is accused of a “strange inconsistency.”
Hugo’s other two allusions to the American slave system can’t be explained away any better. Contra the publisher, they are deeply connected to the characters and incidents of the novel. Les Misérables is about tyrannical systems, and the first mention of Brown is in connection with the glorious heritage that the French Revolution, which has inspired fights against tyranny around the world. John Brown’s battle at Harper’s Ferry is included in the list:
[Paris] is superb; it has a prodigious 14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar, Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779, at the Isle de Léon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper’s Ferry…
To be fair, Washington and “Boston in 1779” occurred before the French Revolution. But otherwise, yes, the French Revolution did have an outsized influence on world history.
The other reference occurs when Marius and his fellow revolutionaries are fighting a doomed street battle against federal troops. Hugo compares them to Brown and calls them sublime:
Even when [such idealists] miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.
Whether they were reading the edited version or not, however, Confederate soldiers found much else to identify with. For instance, Steinroetter cites Brian Temple’s account of how prisoners at a notorious Delaware camp were inspired by the novel to escape. (I believe Jean Valjean pulls off five escapes in the course of the novel.):
Many of the imprisoned Confederate soldiers at the Fort Delaware prison also read Les Misérables, as Brian Temple explains. Since “the prisoners were not allowed to have any books that dealt with military strategy, military history, or geography,” they often had to make do with “books on religious topics and novels” instead. And Hugo’s novel was one of those read by many soldiers at this Union prison.32 Ironically, though, such reading material did not always prove as harmless as the guards hoped, as at least one prison break owed its success in part to Hugo’s novel and its “vivid delineations of the wonderful escapes of Jean Valjean, and of the subterranean passages of the city of Paris.” Paralleling Valjean’s strategy, Kentucky cavalry officer Thomas H. Hines, along with a Confederate general and five others, managed to escape by digging holes in their cells and escaping through the “air chambers.”
I also like Steinroetter’s theory that one prisoner, this one a northerner in the notorious Andersonville prison, identified with Hugo’s excruciating description of the Paris sewers. Here are his diary observations:
[Hugo] justly points out and criticises fallacies and foibles of society; the coarseness, licentiousness and materiality of royalty; suggests economy in correcting customary waste in cities, and in disposing of refuse that goes into the sea which should enrich the soil; contends that such methods of sewage disposal is unsanitary and unjust; illustrates good and bad practices in a way proverbial. The work is not sensational, but philosophical; not a “yarn” but a social teacher.
Steinroetter notes,
One could easily speculate that Northrop’s praises of the novel’s suggested improvements to urban sanitation and waste disposal were influenced by the appalling living conditions at Andersonville.
And then there’s the prisoner who identified with the mistreated child Cosette:
James Parks Caldwell, a Northern-born Confederate held prisoner in an Ohio prison on Johnson’s Island, wrote in his diary on January 15, 1864, that “water carrying is a great bore, and has procured me the Soubriquet of Cosette.” Caldwell, who also refers to one of his friends as “Gavroche,” a street urchin from Hugo’s novel, uses the character of Cosette, who is forced to carry water and perform other menial tasks in the book, as a half-serious stand-in for his own status as a prisoner.
One soldier, the brother of novelist Henry James, reports using the novel to prepare himself for battle.
For instance, the brother of Henry James, Garth Wilkinson “Wilky” James, who served in two Massachusetts regiments, including the 54th, during the war, appears to have sought out the novel’s description of the Battle of Waterloo deliberately in preparation for an upcoming military engagement. As James wrote in a letter sent in the spring of 1863, “Today is Sunday and I’ve been reading Hugo’s account of Waterloo in ‘Les Miserables’ and preparing my mind for something of the same sort. God grant the battle may do as much harm to the Rebels as Waterloo did to the French.” Not only did the French novel strike James as immediately relevant to the Civil War, but his comments show that an American soldier could seek and perhaps find comfort and guidance from parts of a novel during the war.
His last comment is important. To cope with the madness of war, soldiers used the novel to frame their experience in a way that gave it meaning. Otherwise, the experience is just too grim.
One other interesting note: Apparently communal readings of the novel increased a sense of troop solidarity:
[C]ommunal novel reading often helped to create a sense of camaraderie among soldiers. In her memoir, Pickett [wife of Major General Pickett] describes that Les Misérables was quickly integrated into the communal reading practices of the soldiers in her husband’s regiment, who formed groups with a designated reader. Many of them also annotated the copy of the book that they passed around, scribbling notes about their own lives and thoughts in the margins and on the flyleaf that visibly linked the book’s action to their own lived experience. The novel, it seems, had the ability to unite them into actual, not just imagined, reading communities.
I don’t begrudge southern soldiers finding comfort where they can. I’m struck, however, that they could not apply this great novel about human tyranny to their own treatment of African Americans. Versions of the Thénardiers’ treatment of Cosette were happening in plantations across the south but readers apparently refused to see it.
Here’s an Advent poem by Madeleine L’Engle that directs us to sing, even when we don’t feel like it. “We cannot wait till the world is sane to raise our songs with joyful voice,” the poet tells us. If Christ’s Light of Love “would not go out,” then we can respond in kind.
First Coming By Madeleine L’Engle
He did not wait till the world was ready, till men and nations were at peace. He came when the Heavens were unsteady, and prisoners cried out for release.
He did not wait for the perfect time. He came when the need was deep and great. He dined with sinners in all their grime, turned water into wine.
He did not wait till hearts were pure. In joy he came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt. To a world like ours, of anguished shame he came, and his Light would not go out.
He came to a world which did not mesh, to heal its tangles, shield its scorn. In the mystery of the Word made Flesh the Maker of the stars was born.
We cannot wait till the world is sane to raise our songs with joyful voice, for to share our grief, to touch our pain, He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!
William Strang, Milton’s Sin and Death at the Gates of Hell
Friday
As we watch the GOP evolve into a pro-Covid party, I find myself thinking about how Satan unleashes Sin and Death upon the world in Paradise Lost. Think of the pair as the Delta and Omicron viruses, encouraged to journey to Earth to make humankind’s lives miserable.
Satan in the scenario would be the GOP, interested only in tearing down, not in building up. “For only in destroying I find ease to my relentless thoughts,” is how Satan puts it at one point. Once Adam and Eve disobey God, he sets Sin and Death upon humankind to do their worst.
Lest you think calling the GOP a pro-Covid party is overblown, consider what is going on. Hoping that voters in the next election will reward them if they sow enough chaos, vaccinated Fox News commentators persuade their viewers not to get vaccinated; former White House physician and now Congressman Ronny Jackson claims that the omicron virus is a hoax; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis punishes school systems for requiring masks; Texas Governor Greg Abbott tries to forbid businesses from requiring masks; red states give money to workers who are fired because they refuse to be vaccinated; a Fox commentator compares Dr. Fauci to Nazi doctor and “angel of death” Josef Mengele; and the GOP as a whole links up with crazies in the anti-vax movement. As a result, Covid deaths in red states are five times higher than those in blue states while 140,000 children find themselves bereft of parents or primary caregivers. By any objective measurement, Republicans have become a party of death.
Early in Paradise Lost, Sin and Death can be found in Hell. (Sin is Satan’s daughter, whom he raped after conceiving her so that Death is simultaneously his son and grandson.) Sin senses that their time has come the moment the humans bite into the apple and tells Death to get ready to travel. He says he’ll follow her anywhere:
Go whither Fate and inclination strong Leads thee, I shall not lag behind, nor err The way, thou leading, such a scent I draw Of carnage, prey innumerable, and taste The savor of death from all things there that live…
Milton compares Death to a vulture anticipating an upcoming battle. Think of him as sniffing out all the unvaccinated:
So saying, with delight he snuffed the smell Of mortal change on Earth. As when a flock Of ravenous fowl, though many a league remote, Against the day of battle, to a field, Where armies lie encamped, come flying, lured With scent of living Carcasses designed For death, the following day, in bloody fight. So scented the grim feature, and upturned His nostril wide into the murky air, Sagacious of his quarry from so far.
On their way to Earth, Sin and Death encounter Satan, who is returning to Hell, mission accomplished. Sin thanks him for all he has accomplished:
O Parent, these are thy magnific deeds, Thy trophies, which thou view’st as not thine own, Thou art their author and prime architect…
To which Satan essentially replies, “Have at it”:
[O]n your joint vigor now My hold of this new kingdom all depends, Through Sin to Death exposed by my exploit. If your joint power prevails, th’ affairs of Hell No detriment need fear, go and be strong.
So Sin and Death—or as I’m calling them today, Delta and Omicron—travel on to Earth to go and become strong. “What thinkst thou of our empire now,” Sin asks upon arriving, to which Death replies,
To me, who with eternal famine pine, Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven, There best, where most with ravine I may meet…
God, looking down upon this s—show, remarks,
See with what heat these dogs of Hell advance To waste and havoc yonder world, which I So fair and good created…
Our own fair and good country could be Covid-free if everyone got vaccinated. Unfortunately, Covid has friends that are prepared to keep that from happening.
I’ve been struck, in America’s current political moment, by how much Republicans love their newfound superpower—which is, that they can misbehave however they want without suffering consequences. In fact, only responsible Republicans these days find themselves reprimanded by their peers, whether for engaging in good-faith negotiation on a bipartisan infrastructure bill or investigating the January 6 insurrection. For everyone else, the parents have left for the weekend so all hell can break loose.
What makes this possible is a “news” network that makes things up, a past president who lies incessantly, and donors who reward outrageous behavior. If reality is whatever we say it is, then there’s no accountability. The situation reminds me of the world that novelist Angela Carter creates in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1973).
I once taught the book in a British fantasy class and found it so unpleasant that I vowed never to assign it again. Now, however, it has the ring of truth. The villain is the 19th century German author E.T.A. Hoffman, who wrote TheNutcracker and the Mouse King and other works of fantasy and gothic horror. In Carter’s novel, Hoffman is the creator of city-wide illusions. Once he gets to work, no one can tell what is real and what is fake.
The changes start imperceptibly, just as Trumpian reality did. Narrator Desiderio, who believes in Reason, is one of the first people to notice
how the shadows began to fall subtly awry and a curious sense of strangeness invaded everything….And the Doctor started his activities in very small ways. Sugar tasted a little salty, sometimes. A door one had always seen to be blue modulated by scarcely perceptible stages until, suddenly, it was a green door.
When the unreality plague is at its height, anything is possible. Here’s a small sampling:
The sense of space was powerfully affected so that sometimes the proportions of buildings and townscapes swelled to enormous, ominous sizes or repeated themselves over and over again in a fretting infinity. But this was much less disturbing than the actual objects which filled these gigantesque perspectives. Often in vaulted architraves of railway stations, women in states of pearly, heroic nudity, their hair elaborately coiffed in the stately chignons of the fin de siècle, might be seen parading beneath their parasols as serenely as if they had been in the Bois de Boulogne…Sometimes the river ran backwards and crazy fish jumped out to flop upon the sidewalks and wriggle around on their bellies for a while until they died…It was, too, the heyday of trompe l’oeil for painted forms took advantage of the liveliness they mimicked. Horses from the pictures of Stubbs in the Municipal Art Gallery neighed, tossed their manes and stepped delicately off their canvases to go crop the grass in public parks. A plump Bacchus wearing only a few grapes strayed from a Titian into a bar and there instituted Dionysiac revelry.
Will this doesn’t sound too bad, there are darker illusions as well:
Frequently, imaginary massacres filled the gutters with blood and, besides, the cumulative psychological effect of all these distortions, combined with the dislocation of everyday life and the hardship of privations we began to suffer, created a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of profound melancholy. It seemed each one of us was trapped in some downward-dropping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape. Many committed suicide.
“Downward-dropping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape” pretty much describes the Trump years.
A one point in the battle to hold on to a determined reality, the city’s Minister of Determination worries that illusions of past mistresses will lure real people into impregnating them, thereby creating “a generation of half-breed ghosts [that] would befoul the city even more.” I think of those once reasonable Republicans who have interbred with Trump’s fantasies (say, over a stolen election), thereby rendering themselves unrecognizable.
The narrator, like many of us gazing in horror at a Trumpified America, describes reacting with a mixture of fascination and dread:
Then, we—that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not—felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice. We found ourselves holding our breath almost in expectancy, as though we might stand on the threshold of a great event, transfixed in the portentous moment of waiting, although inwardly we were perturbed since this new, awesome, orchestration of time and space which surrounded us might be only the overture to something else, to some most profoundly audacious of all these assaults against the things we had always known.
Hoffman’s infernal desire machines, it turns out, operate by mechanistically tapping into our inexhaustible “eroto-energy,” thereby creating images that we cannot resist. While this means that, on one level, our dreams come true, it’s also the case that we are no more than Pavlovian dogs. Hoffman has but to mix some sights, sounds and colors, ring a bell, and we salivate. In fact, he becomes weary of his project, even though it brings him immense power, prompting the narrator to comment, “I would have hated him less if he had been less bored with his inventions.”
Conservative Never Trumper Tom Nichols has described America as “an unserious nation threatened by millions of spoiled, stupid adult children,” and I wonder if Carter’s novel gets at this reality. (Being English, she could also be getting at the fantasies that prompted large numbers of Brits to vote against their well-being and for Brexit.) Desiring their fantasies, large portions of the American electorate thrill to Trump tickling their pleasure centers, and even though he resorts to the same tired act over and over, for some it works every time.
Maybe this is a rich country problem, where bored people (some of whom flew their planes to Washington to participate in the January 6 insurrection) seek thrills to give their lives meaning. Why settle for mere technocratic competence when you can get a show every day? Whereas Joe Biden listens to scientists and tries to get everyone vaccinated, Trump and his cult tout bleach and ivermectin and conspiracy theories and the thrill of flaunting death.
These spoiled, stupid adult children, unlike actual children, have a fully developed frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex (responsible for the executive function), which means they have no excuse. Tell them what they want to hear and they’ll follow you anywhere.
In the novel, there are only two characters who have a fighting chance against Hoffman—Desiderio, whose imagination is balanced with his love of Reason, and the Minister of Determination, who has no imagination at all, being a colorless bureaucrat who believes in order. While Trump riled up those with vivid imaginations, his coup attempt was thwarted by a number of Republicans who were no more than good bureaucrats. It was secretaries of state and election supervisors that saved our democracy by simply running a matter-of-fact election.
Unfortunately, Trump and his followers are trying to unseat them, replacing them with people who are susceptible to the former president’s infernal desire machines. Trump’s eroto-energy has enough of a hold over enough Republicans that future elections are in doubt.
In the novel, Desiderio triumphs, although only barely, and we should all hope that, between Enlightenment Reason and bureaucratic competence, we will defeat Trumpism. But I worry that, because a technocrat like Joe Biden can’t put on a Trump-like show, maybe some of his drop in popularity is attributable to nostalgia for the circus of the last administration. As I look back at 2016-20, I relate to Desiderio looking back at the days when Hoffman’s desire machines ran unchecked:
In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualized desire, I myself had only the one desire. And that was, for everything to stop.
I became a hero only because I survived. I survived because I could not surrender to the flux of mirages. I could not merge and blend with them; I could not abnegate my reality and lose myself forever as others did, blasted to non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason.
We’ve been bombarded by this ferocious artillery for some time. May we resist its flux of images.
Further thought: Carter wrote her novel in 1973, when the left-leaning counterculture was engaged in its own assault on norms and conventions. Have we come full circle, with anarchy now coming from the right? From a historical point of view, it’s a fascinating turn of events.
In response to a recent post on how “Great Novels Tell Uncomfortable Truths,” reader David Rothman, himself a novelist, alerted me to the problems he has encountered getting an uncomfortable novel about Congolese child soldiers published. This despite selling six earlier books to publishers. Novels can sometimes break through where news stories cannot, but they have to at least see the light of day.
In probing the reasons for Drone Child’s current challenges., David encountered the problem of self-censorship—which is to say, teachers who are afraid of how administrators might respond if they assigned the book or even purchased it for the school library.
Fortunately, one can self-publish, and Drone Child is now available on Amazon. But David’sexperience still raisestroubling questions. I invited him to tell his story, which you read below.In addition to writing novels, David is a former poverty beat reporter, has written several books of non-fiction, advocates for libraries, and publishes the TeleRead.org ebook site. His previous novel was The Solomon Scandals. . He is reachable at [email protected]
Guest Post by Novelist David H. Rothman
While electric cars may be our future, fewer Americans might be able to afford them because the Chinese have cornered so much of the market for the cobalt used in batteries. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, as reported in a recently published New York Times series, is a major source. But we should care about the Congo also for humanitarian reasons, given that the country is torn apart by conflict minerals and intertribal rivalries. This on top of the Congo’s crime and poverty!
Now, suppose a novel might prod at least a few voters out of their apathy. My novel Drone Child tackles the issues. In it, a pair of 15-year-old twins flee their village to escape gun-worshipping rebels who make children kill their own parents. Child has sex and violence. But how could one write about wars in the real Congo—the rape capital of the world—without them?
Child also comes with a sympathetic, upbeat hero who belies the “s-hole country” stereotypes. Lemba not only survives but prospers. He ideally can serve as a role model for some disadvantaged young people of all races, even though he himself offers a caveat on page one of his war memoir: “Of course, I was lucky—fate could easily have flattened me. All I could do was try.”
Two Congolese have vetted Drone Child, one of them a civic leader and a winner of a prestigious Mandela Washington Fellowship sponsored by the U.S. State Department. They believe it is both highly readable and authentic enough to merit publication in the DRC itself. A Congolese war refugee who lived out real-life nightmares similar to those of the protagonist agrees.
As the author I’m hardly disinterested, but shouldn’t Drone Child at least have a chance to beat the scary odds and reach the right readers—especially bright young people able to identify with the techie brother and his gifted songbird of a sister? Child even comes with a downloadable discussion guide for book clubs, schools, and libraries. An author’s note delves into facts vis-à-vis fiction.
In my book, soldiers cut off and eat a woman’s arm. It happened in the real Congo, complete with a promise to dine on her husband’s heart. Holocaust histories can come with graphic references to lampshades made of white human skin. Shouldn’t we care regardless of the races and countries of the victims? And how about some of the most timeless plays and novels? If Romeo and Juliet can die suicides and Macduff can behead Macbeth and a mother in Beloved can kill her baby—well, must we be so protective of delicate minds?
Unfortunately, many say yes. As one retired high school teacher told me, “I’d have been fired if I taught your book.” She loved Child but could vividly picture herself broke and begging on the streets if she shared her enthusiasm with 12th graders. Mind you, this was in a liberal state. A former substitute in Texas more or less told me the same.
By contrast, one of my fact-checkers in the Congo said Child was just right for schools there. No, I won’t condemn U.S. teachers based on the just-given examples. My sample is far too small, and of course, teachers are simply captives of administrators, who are themselves answerable to politicians. As if that is not enough, some educators have received death threats for the books they’ve taught. Is my book worth a teacher or librarian risking his or her life?
Let’s also remember some other nuances. There is a difference between a book being compulsory reading for 10-year-olds—and no, I’m not calling for Child to be—and its simply being available in a school or public library for high school seniors or adults. Education Week has just run an excellent interview with Jennisen Lucas, the president of the American Association of School Librarians in which she explores some of the subtleties of the censorship controversy.
I’ll keep an open mind. Still, if nothing else, the reactions of the retired teacher and the former substitute hint of the challenges ahead for Child in schools and libraries amid the current censorship mania.
One other reason could be that the book is self-published—hardly an accident, considering the aversion of some publishers and agents to my subject matter. The publisher of my first novel, The Solomon Scandals, rejected Child. A Yale-educated lit grad working for the Washington City Paper had praised Scandals for the “same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles.” But the publisher apparently considered the zeal in Child itself to be too dicey.
“It sounds incredibly important and meaningful (and wow that opening scene, that’ll stay with me), but I’m afraid that by the sound of it, it’s going to be a bit too thematically dark for me right now,” one New York literary agent wrote. At least she was gentle with me. Another agent, whom I’d known for years on a mutual first-name basis, suddenly went formal with a “Dear Mr. Rothman.” Publishers and agents should serve as gatekeepers, but could this avoidance of “thematically dark” topics at times get in the way of books legitimately exploring topics about which more Americans should know as both humans and citizens? De facto self-censorship?
Alex Haley’s Roots is said to have been rejected 200 times. At least partly due to the book business’s genteel racism (still around despite reforms), more than a few publishers have spurned Black-written novels that would go on to become best-selling classics. Commercial reasons undoubtedly were among those given. But what’s the cart and what’s the horse? Could kowtowing to American racism be another form of censorship?
Regarding Amazon, I’m of mixed mind. Thank goodness it can help me bypass censors and self-censors. On the other hand, Amazon so far has failed me as a marketing tool. Child went on sale there earlier this year with a less enticing cover and a different title, but another challenge is that few customers now care about the Congo and child soldiers. (I base this on the number of searches for related terms and ad-response statistics.) Racism at work?
In response, we should be pushing for more books encouraging Whites to empathize with people of color, both here and abroad. Publishers, librarians and others should be trying harder to enlarge the universe of readers among minorities. The very books that most offend bigots at times may be useful in doing what Child may do for certain young people of all colors—provide them with positive role models.
Amazon’s big goal is to cater to the consumer-reader, but that philosophy isn’t necessarily good for books that address disturbing social issues, including novels. Robin Bates got at what we lose when he criticized a guest MSNBC commentator for asserting that the fuss over Toni Morrison’s book was
overblown because Beloved is only fiction. In saying so, he underestimates the disruptive potential of novels. Indeed, Beloved is meant to disturb readers, Black as well as White. Great literature is often great because it disturbs.
I’ll leave it for others to decide if Drone Child is great or even just good, but I would never deny that my book disturbs, as well it should—given the atrocities happening today in the Congo.
